The founder and central figure of the thought reform cult known as ‘Desteni’, based on a farm near Durban, South Africa, depicts himself like arch-occultist, magician of the Black Arts, Aleister Crowley, as a ‘Great Beast’.
Everything in Bernard Poolman’s Desteni is occult. It’s in reverse. It involves magical thinking. It’s the wrong way round. Fiction is presented as fact. The same as a lie. A big, diabolical lie.
Since the Desteni organisation began in 2007 (see original desteni-universe website), its founder has preferred to remain mysteriously hidden – occulted – with the only image of him being a cartoon of a monstrous figure with ram’s horns, the tail of a crocodile, the face of a lion, arms of a bear, wings and the legs of an elephant. It’s a new hybrid breed of the Beast of Revelation, another babbling Baphomet, Devil of the Tarot cards.
Perhaps Poolman in his self-appointed role as notorious cult leader wants to be another Aleister Crowley, ‘the wickedest man alive’?
Poolman rails against God and other human beings as he projects the illusion of himself to his admirers as a self-perfected man of ‘common sense’, a master of ‘equality’.
The cult that surrounds him campaigns for a theocratic totalitarian global government under the banner of the ‘Equal Life Party’. The policies of the ‘Equal Life Party’ describe the political structure of Poolman's empire, his ‘nation of Desteni’. Beyond that limited territory, ‘Equal Life’ policies have no meaning or relevance. The Desteni cult is a business run according to a doctrine of emotional, mental and physical domination by the fascist dictator of an ideology rooted in occultism.
Poolman says he has no personality and no mind. He represents himself and his organisation as having the monopoly on ‘actual reality’. His version of ‘actual reality’ is based on elaborate fictions about how he managed to help facilitate the ‘deletion’ of occult or esoteric concepts such as ‘the White Light’, the ‘Akashic Records’, ‘Ascended Masters’ ‘the dimensions’, ‘the Soul Construct’ and so on.
He claims that they were at one time real, but because of his efforts they have now been removed. He fails to mention that such things were fictions to begin with. In Poolman’s world-view almost everyone outside of his ‘Desteni’ group he portrays as conditioned by religious fanaticism or the New Age Movement.
His ‘removal’ of these formerly real ‘constructs’ he describes as having occurred in relation to his communications with a young woman barely out of her teens, Sunette Spies. He depicts her as, not a person, but an ‘interdimensional portal’ or ‘the resonances’. Sunette has surpassed her personality and her own mind, say the followers of Poolman’s ‘Desteni’.
(See: Desteni Background - 1, 2, 3 Portal Secrets
Poolman defines the aims of the Desteni ideology by condemning God, religion and the New Age Movement. Every element of a self-mythologised, assumed authority and the invention of the Desteni ‘process’ is fabricated out of truths, half-truths, lies, fictions and sheer gobbledegook derived from the very same sources Poolman tries to prove are inferior to his theories: Christianity, Satanism, Theosophy, the occult, esotericism, Eastern mysticism and the New Age Movement.
He’s mashed up that source material, squandered it, ripped it to pieces and put it back together again. His denunciation of ideas found in all manner of religious esoterica as ‘evil’ is used as the basis for Poolman’s bizarre argument that he is the man of ‘common sense’, a ‘life instructor’ with no personality and no mind. The only thing in the world that is actually real and can bring about ‘heaven on earth’, Poolman says, is world revolution instigated by his ‘Desteni’.
The influence of occult or mystical philosophies of the Religion of Eckankar, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey, J.Z. Knight, Baird T. Spalding, Swami Muktananda, ‘A Course in Miracles’, Lee Carroll, ‘The Pleiadian Agenda’, Osho and Alice A. Bailey, and direct references to them can be found throughout the Desteni material, as can numerous other similar sources.
Poolman’s irrational speculations and incoherent theorising about concepts which can be found in these philosophies appear to serve to re-frame, recycle and ultimately usurp them. He dictates their plausibility or lack of it as the imperial lord and master of the religious, occult, mystical philosophies he so despises.